A group of psychological scientists have identified 25 principles of learning. Of those 25, this group identified 9 to explore in greater depth as they relate to instruction. In this series of posts, I’ll look at each in turn, discussing some of the relevant technologies that can be used to take advantage of those principles.

The first in the list: “The single most important variable in promoting long-term retention and transfer is ‘practice at retrieval’—learners generate responses, with minimal retrieval cues, repeatedly, over time.” In short, if students are going to be able to retrieve what they learned later they have to practice retrieving now (the testing effect), and they have to space out that retrieval (the spacing effect). Practicing retrieval for 4 hours straight is not as effective as spacing those 4 hours out over the course of a couple weeks or more.

The authors make 4 recommendations.

1. “During lectures, ask students questions to elicit responses that reflect understanding of previously introduced course material. This serves the dual purpose of probing students’ knowledge, so that misconceptions can be directly and immediately addressed in the lecture.”
   

   Ways to do this.

   1. 4-question technique. Dietz-Uhler and Lanter (2009) found improvement in quiz scores by asking students four questions following an in-class activity.
      1. “Identify one important concept, research finding, theory, or idea in psychology that you learned while completing this activity.”
      2. “Why do you believe that this concept, research finding, theory, or idea in psychology is important?”
      3. “Apply what you have learned from this activity to some aspect of your life.”
      4. “What question(s) has the activity raised for you? What are you still wondering about?”
   2. Fill-in-the-blank, content-based questions. Gier and Kreiner (2009) found improvement on exam scores when students were periodically asked to respond to fill-in-the-blank questions over course material during class.
   3. End-of-class questions. Lyle and Crawford (2011) found improvement on exam scores in a stats class when their students were asked to respond, unassisted, to a few questions over the day’s material at the end of class.

   
   Useful tech tools.

   1. Pen and paper. There is nothing wrong with this old school technology. Depending on the size of your class and how often your class meets, you could be wrangling a lot of paper.
   2. Student response systems. If you don’t currently use a system. Try Socrative (max 50 students, free). This tool is easy to use and allows both multiple choice and short answer questions. The data is downloadable via an Excel spreadsheet.
   3. Forms in Google Docs (read more about how to use this feature). Give students the URL to the form via a link on a website or in your course management system, a shortened URL (I recommend goo.gl), or a QR code for your mobile users (read more about QR codes). Students enter their names, their email addresses, their class time, and then whatever questions you’d like them to answer about the course material. The data is dumped into a spreadsheet that you can download from Google Docs. When I do this, I add a column for my comments and a column for my grade. Then I create a form letter in Word, link it to my spreadsheet, and do a mail merge to send my feedback to students (read more about mail merge here).

       

2. “On homework assignments, have students retrieve key information from lectures and readings. Chapter summaries, for instance, may include study questions that ask students to recall major points or conclusions to be drawn from the reading.”
   

   Useful tech tools.

   1. Forms in Google Docs (read more about how to use this feature). For each reading assignment, I ask students to answer four questions. The first two questions cover the content. Question 3 asks what was the most difficult part of the reading and what questions they may have. Question 4 asks what was the most interesting thing they read. I use the mail merge procedure discussed above to send my feedback to students. This is my first quarter using this approach. On the first exam, I saw no difference in exam scores compared to last quarter. I saw a statistically significant jump in exam scores on the second exam – a full letter grade. In my perception, students wrote more and wrote better responses during the second section of the course leading up to the second exam. That may be due to my feedback, to my asking better content questions that require more synthesis of information, or to something else entirely.
   2. Word documents. If your students submit assignments by attaching them to email messages that you get in Outlook, I highly recommend SimplyFile, an Outlook add-in (read more here), to quickly file the messages in a folder so they’re out of your inbox. And then use EZDetach, another Outlook add-in (read more here), to save all of the attachments with student email address and student name appended to the filename to your “grade these” folder.

       

3. “Encourage group studying in which students actively discuss course topics. In these groups, students have an opportunity to explain difficult course concepts to one and another, engaging in ‘practice at retrieval.'”
   

   Useful tech tools.

   1. Doodle (read more here). A lot of students say they’d like to form study groups, but they don’t quite know how to do it. Create a Doodle poll that asks students to mark the times they’re available for a study group. Students can see who is available when they’re available. Let the students take the initiative to contact those other students.
   2. TitanPad (read more here). For students whose schedule or location makes it difficult to get together, they could use this tool to explain concepts in their own words or provide their own examples. Groups of students can work together on the same ‘pad’. With the time slider feature, you can easily see who contributed what and when if you’d like to assign a participation grade.
   3. Google+ hangouts with video or Skype. These are good tools for students who’d like to get together to study at a particular time, but are unable to be in the same place.

4. “As with probing questions during lectures, test questions offer another opportunity for ‘practice at retrieval,’ thus, potentially enhancing knowledge of the material being tested. Ideally tests should be cumulative and test items should probe for understanding of the material.”
   

    

   In terms of test performance, it doesn’t matter if you give a paper-and-pencil test or a computer-based test (Frein, 2011). Whichever you use, I encourage you to look at how your students perform on each question. If a lot of students missed the question, what incorrect answer did they choose? This will give you valuable information about common misconceptions.

Whatever changes you decide to make in your course, I strongly encourage you to track the impact your changes have made on student learning, however it is you choose to measure it. Your institution may be interested for their assessment reports to their accreditors, and I encourage you submit your results for publication in a peer-reviewed journal or a conference that’s interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). This site provides some resources for locating those journals and conferences.

References

Dietz-Uhler, B. & Lanter, J. R. (2009). Using the four-questions technique to enhance learning. Teaching of Psychology, 36(1), 38-41. doi:10.1080/00986280802529327

Frein, S.T. (2011). Comparing in-class and out-of-class computer-based tests to traditional paper-and-pencil tests in Introductory Psychology courses. Teaching of Psychology, 38(4), 282-287). doi: 10.1177/0098628311421331

Giers, V. S. & Kreiner, D. S. (2009). Incorporating active learning with powerpoint-based lectures using content-based questions. Teaching of Psychology, 36(2), 134-139. doi:10.1080/00986280902739792

Lyle, K.B. & Crawford, N.A. (2011). Retrieving essential material at the end of lectures improves performance on statistics exams. Teaching of Psychology, 38(2), 94-97. doi:
10.1177/0098628311401587

Quick Tech Tip: When using Chrome, downloaded files appear at the bottom of the browser window. Want to save it someplace rather than keep it in your downloads folder? Click and drag the file to your desktop or into a folder.

[Update 2/27/2012 :  Grab is a similar utility for Mac users.  Go to Applications and look in the Utilities folder. — Thanks, Steve!]

Well, you already have this screen capture tool if you’re a Windows 7 user. Click the start button, select “all programs”, and in your accessories folder you’ll find “Snipping Tool”.

Now that you’ve found it, right-click on it, and select “pin to start menu” so it will be easily accessible.

When you run Snipping Tool, this little window pops up.

Click the little down arrow next to “New” to decide how you’d like to take a snapshot of your computer’s desktop. Whatever you choose will be the default the next time the program runs, but you can change it any time. I prefer the “rectangular snip”. The next time I run the program, I will just click the word “New”, bypassing this little menu.

Your screen will become faded, except for the Snipping Tool window. A cross (+) will appear. Click the mouse and drag the cross to encompass the area you want a picture of. Unclick. A preview will show in the window, like this screenshot I took of the word unclick.

Now you can save it, copy it to your clipboard (then paste it, for example, in a document like I’ve done here), email it to someone, write on it, or highlight some part of it. If you write on it, and want to erase, click the little eraser icon.

To take another shot, click the “new” button.

Almost all of the screenshots you see in this blog were done using Snipping Tool. Others, like most of the ones for this particular blog post, I used “Print Screen”. On your keyboard there’s a key labeled something like “PRTSC” or it may even say “Print Screen”. Hit that button, and while it looks like nothing has happened, an image of your computer’s desktop has just been saved to your clipboard. Go to, say, a Word document, and paste. An image of your computer’s desktop will be embedded in the document.

I’m a fan of keyboard shortcuts, so here’s another one. (Okay. I confess. My wife asked me to find this one for her.)

Let’s say you’re reading a webpage, and in the process, your cursor gets moved out of the address bar. You now want to type in another web address, so you reach for your mouse to move the cursor into the address bar ready to highlight the URL so you can replace it with a new one.

But wait! You don’t need your mouse.

In Firefox and Chrome, CTRL-L not only places the cursor in the address bar, but it also highlights the entire URL. Just start typing your new URL.

Use this keyboard shortcut in combination with Shortmarks (see this previous blog post) for blazing fast web-browsing.

[Update 2/29/2012: The folks at Fiesta.cc announced that someone else will be taking over maintenance of the service.]

In this earlier blog post, I recommended using Fiesta.cc as a tool for collaboration. It was a quick and easy way to create email distribution lists. Unfortunately Fiesta.cc just announced that they’re closing down effective March 1^st, 2012. They are open to a buyer, so if someone is looking for a business opportunity…

Looking for an alternative? Try Google Groups. You can create a private group just for your class. I’ll write more about how Google Groups work in a future blog post.

A couple weeks ago I was sitting in our psychology lab when a student wandered in.

Me: Can I help you?

Student: <locating the clock on the wall> I was wondering what time it is.

The student is visually impaired, judging by how close he was standing to the clock and how he was squinting.

Me: It’s 20 ’til 11.

Student: What?

Thinking the student is also partially deaf, I speak up.

Me: IT’S 20 ‘TIL 11.

Student looks at the clock, clearly baffled. Another student in the lab chimes in.

Student #2: It’s 10:40.

Student: Oh! I’m late!

Finally it dawns on me. The student didn’t know how to read an analog clock. He wasn’t a young student, either; probably in his thirties. I mentioned this to a colleague who has a teenage daughter. He said that she also can’t read an analog clock. Although he wasn’t entirely convinced she could tell time at all judging by her inability to be on time. There are some confounding variables there, granted.

One week later I’m back in the lab when another student wanders in; this one is younger. I’m thinking, “Here we go again.”

Me: Can I help you?

Student: <locating the clock on the wall> I just wanted to know what time it is.

Student stares at the clock.

Student: <wanting to give it a try> It’s 9… no, it’s 10… 10…

Me: 10:40.

Student continues to stare at the clock not quite believing me.

Me: It’s actually 10:37.

Satisfied, the student walks out.

[Side note: Weirdly, both of these events did take place at 10:40-ish.]

Now I’m not curmudgeonly enough to say that everyone should know how to read an analog clock. In our digital world, it doesn’t matter. Slide rules were very useful right up until calculators became small enough and cheap enough for most everyone to have. It’s been years since I had an analog watch, or a watch of any kind for that matter; the digital display on my cell phone works just fine when I’m on the go. When I’m in my office, my computer provides a nice digital readout in the bottom right corner.

A few colleagues and I were discussing this phenomenon recently. One person wondered what that was going to do to the concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise. Will the terms disappear or will they continue to be used but with their origin largely forgotten, like “the whole nine yards”? Apparently it’s becoming something of an issue because I noticed the recent addition of helpful arrow icons to Adobe Reader. Maybe in the end it will just be “rotate right” and “rotate left”.

Another colleague wondered what will happen to “the top of the hour.” That one may hang on with its origins eventually lost, but I’d say that the days are numbered for “quarter past” and “quarter ’til”. “Half past” may also be doomed.

If you’re feeling adventurous, show your students a few images of an analog clock and ask them to write down what time the clock is showing. I’d be curious to hear how many can do it. Post your results in the comments below.

My students submit their assignments to me primarily as an email attachment. I have ways of quickly filing the email messages in Outlook (see the SimplyFile blog post), and then quickly saving the attachments all at once to my “student papers” folder while appending the students’ names and email addresses to the filename (see the EZDetach blog post). Once the papers are graded, I move them to my “graded” folder. Once I send them back to students, I move them to my “sent” folder where they sit until the end of the term when I move them into a folder named for that quarter. And there they sit until a student asks for a letter of recommendation. I go back to the quarter in question and sift through all of the assignments submitted that term. What if I filed all of the “sent” assignments into folders for each individual student? It’d be easy enough to do, but the thought of creating folders for each student one by one made me a little nauseous. I figured someone must have already figured this one out. And indeed they had.

I found the solution in this Lifehacker post. There’s a little program for Windows called Text 2 Folders (download it here). Click on the “portable zip” link to download the file. Open the folder, and “extract” the files. I saved them in a new “Text 2 Folders” folder in Dropbox, but put it wherever you’d like; it just needs to be someplace you will remember.

Text 2 Folders uses a txt file to create the folders. I’ll use Notepad, located in my Start menu’s Accessories folder, to create the txt file.

Creating the txt file.

I could just type in the names, like I did here.

But typing each name is a little tedious. I could copy and paste names out of my Excel spreadsheet. However, since I have first and last names in different columns, when I copy and paste, I get this funky spacing.

While I could go through and remove the additional spacing for each line, that’s, again, tedious. Instead I’m going to use one of Excel’s features to do this for me.

I want each folder name to look like this: Lastname Firstname

In Excel, I’ll add a column between the last and first names. In the top cell of that column (column B), I’ll add a space, then copy that cell all the way down.

Now I’m going to ask Excel to combine columns A, B, and C into column D. In the top cell of column D, enter =A1&B1&C1, and that cell will be replaced with Brown Charlie. Copy the cell down through the rest of that column. My spreadsheet now looks like this.

I’ll just highlight and copy column D and paste it into my open Notepad txt file. It looks just like if I had typed each name individually.

I’ll save the txt file to my desktop for easy access. I named mine folders.txt.

Creating folders.

Locate your Text 2 Folders folder. Double-click on the file “Text2Folders”. You will see this popup window.

Identify where you would like all of your shiny, new folders to go. Click the button to the right of the “root folder” box and navigate to the folder you’d like. Next, click the button to the right of the “text file” box and navigate to the text folder you created above.

I recommend checking the “Show folder after run” box, otherwise it will be easy to miss the fact that your folders have been created.

OK, ready for the magic? Click the “Create folders” button.

Done. My new folders are now ready in my Peanuts folder.

How slick was that?

During winter break I spent most of my computer time on my personal laptop. When I got back on my (older) work laptop this week, I found that it was moving at a crawl. The sensation was undoubtedly amplified by the, by comparison, rocket ship I had been using. After some trial and error, I identified the culprit: Chrome. Or more specifically, one webpage I had open in Chrome.

Chrome is designed in such a way that each tab is essentially another instance of the program running. The advantage is that if a web page causes a crash, only that tab crashes; the rest of the tabs continue to run just fine.

As it turns out, some webpages suck up more RAM than other webpages do. Chrome comes with its own task manager so you can see what’s hogging all of your RAM, leaving less RAM to run other programs, like Word or Excel. To access the task manager, in Chrome click on the little wrench to access the settings, then under “Tools” select “Task manager.” Alternatively, while in Chrome, hit Shift+Esc on your keyboard.

This is what my Chrome task manager is showing me right now. I clicked on the top of the memory column to sort by memory usage. All of the icons that look like jigsaw puzzle pieces are Chrome add-ons that I have installed. I have six tabs open, with Google Calendar using up 208,752K of RAM. That’s quite a bit, but my computer is running just fine.

Earlier today when my computer was crawling, I looked at the Chrome task manager, and Google Reader was using a whopping 500,000K of RAM. I closed that tab and my computer sped right up. I just opened Google Reader again, and it was using a measly 55,000K.

The moral of the story: If you use Chrome, and your computer is struggling, open Chrome’s task manager to identify the offending webpage or extension, then close the page or disable the extension to free up RAM for the rest of your programs.

In July 2011 I wrote about Socrative, a web-based student response system. (See the blog post here.) The brief version: The instructor logs into the Socrative website and gets a room number (change to whatever you’d like). Students visit the website on whatever web-enabled device they have (smartphone, iPod, tablet, laptop), and enter the room number. The instructor can ask multiple choice, true/false, or short answer questions. Ask them on the fly or create quizzes in advance. These quizzes can be teacher-paced or student-paced. Responses are collated into a spreadsheet and emailed to the instructor.

Socrative has added several very useful features to begin 2012.

On the premade quizzes, you can now randomize the answers. This is very handy if you want to make cheating a little more difficult.

The feature I really like is that you can choose whether you want students to get immediate feedback or not. After each exam, I identify the 4 most-missed questions. I push those questions back out to my students at the beginning of the next class session. Students can use their books, notes, and the other students near them to answer the questions for half credit. With immediate feedback turned off, students can’t share the correct answers with those around them.

Reports from quizzes used to be automatically emailed to instructors. Now you can choose to have it emailed, download it right now, or even choose not to have a report at all.

When building the premade quizzes, it is now possible to reorder the questions. That will be a huge help!

Another Socrative feature that I haven’t seen in other systems is the ability to push short answer responses back out to students for voting. The new addition is the ability to keep specific short answer responses from being sent back out for voting.

Read more about Socrative’s new features.